But the size of the planned repurchases is miniscule, doubling from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation. In July alone, the Federal budget deficit was $432 billion.
Posts tagged as “Column of the Day”
For the second straight year hundreds of people in Bloomfield are sore that while their side prevailed overwhelmingly in a referendum on the town budget (according to the Hartford Courant, the vote was 1,959 against the budget to 305 for it), the budget again has been deemed approved, this time with a 3% tax increase. Some property owners will end up facing a tax increase approaching 11% because the town is still implementing updated property valuations, which have soared with inflation.
Bloomfield Mayor Anthony Harrington told the Courant... that the budget was a lean as it could be...and asked “Where would the budget reductions come from?"
Yes, Bloomfield’s budget could have been reduced. For the biggest single expense in government in Connecticut is personnel, and with laws requiring unionization of state and municipal government employees, binding arbitration of their union contracts... state government has essentially put the costs of government personnel beyond economizing.
All together these laws result in compensation for government employees that is far more generous than what is received by private-sector employees in comparable jobs. That is what state and municipal elected and budget officials are hinting at when they shrug and say their budgeting options are limited by “fixed costs.”
The solution is obvious but always unspoken: To freeze or reduce taxes, you have to unfix the “fixed costs.”
Those costs weren’t fixed by God but by legislators and governors who long have been subservient to a particular special interest — a special interest that has come to control an entire political party, a special interest that the other major party is usually too timid to challenge.
Whatever the long-term military consequences of the war in Gaza, its effect on the American public’s support for Israel has been catastrophic and won’t be reversed quickly.
For the first time since Gallup began measuring attitudes on this matter a quarter-century ago, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis.
The decline isn’t limited to young Americans, who favor the Palestinians by 53% to 23%. The shift among 35- to 54-year-olds has been even sharper.
Blue-state and blue-city voters pay higher taxes. Blue states and cities often also pay state and local government workers more than similar jobs pay in red jurisdictions, even after adjusting for the cost of living.
Much of this gap is tied up in pension benefits. Workers generally value higher wages today. But pensions are attractive to politicians who pass future costs to future taxpayers.
The question is whether one segment of workers should retire with greater security than others, at the expense of services that the public depends on.
The Democrats’ lurch to the left is accelerating at warp speed — and Connecticut is the latest victim.
The state legislature’s Democrat supermajority last week rammed through a hosing bill that’s a thinly disguised socialist wishlist.
What we call the “gig economy” is, in practice, a debt-and-fear economy — one that goes unchallenged in hyper-progressive places like NYC precisely because liberals have redefined “compassion” as ignoring the law.
Connecticut is again poised to take a costly step deeper into the business of health care.
On Oct. 14, the CT Mirror reported the state is preparing to borrow nearly $390 million to allow UConn Health to purchase Waterbury Hospital from Prospect Medical Holdings, a bankrupt private operator.
In 2023 computer hackers stole $6 million from the New Haven school system and city government fired the system’s information technology director over it. ...the other day a labor arbitrator ruled that the theft wasn’t the fault of the information technology director and that she must be returned to her job with back pay, which may amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Mayor Justin Elicker said he was “disappointed” by the arbitrator’s decision and still believes that the firing was justified.
But the mayor can’t be too disappointed. If he really thought the employee is culpable and her reinstatement is wrong, he might be questioning the state law and the city’s contracts with its unions that give government employees the right to binding arbitration of personnel decisions and well as binding arbitration of union contracts themselves.
After all, the public elects mayors and school board members to administer the government. The public doesn’t elect arbitrators.
At the heart of this concern is the sheer scale of exposure, both domestic and international, to American equities. This growing interconnectedness means that any sharp downturn in American markets will reverberate around the world.
Inside Investigator submitted a Freedom of Information request to the state Comptroller’s office for all full-time executive branch employees with mailing addresses outside the state of Connecticut and received back 505 names, with town and state data.
By far, most of those employees (442) live in Connecticut’s next door neighbor states.
In some cases, the data was just wrong... one manager who lived in Florida had actually retired... Others had retired,.. but have since returned to state service as a temporary worker/retiree and maintain residence in-state. Others were seasonal employees or substitute teachers who only worked occasionally...
For the remaining full-time, active employees who had out of state mailing addresses – of which there were thirteen – they were nearly all long-time employees, making over six figures, and working in IT or a similarly computer-based role.